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Keith Law of The Athletic published his Top 100 prospects list for the 2026 season, and a pair ofYankees made the cut.

-- SS George Lombard Jr., No. 24

-- RHP Carlos Lagrange, No. 88

Here’s Law on Lombard:

If he’d spent half the year in High A instead of four weeks, his year would probably look more promising on the surface, and since he won’t turn 21 until June he has time to return to Double A and show he can handle the pitching there. He’s at least a future everyday shortstop and still has upside beyond that because of the potential for a plus hit tool.

And on Lagrange:

The Dellin Betances comps are inevitable here, but Lagrange moves better on the mound and has more weapons already. He should stick as a starter, and could end up in the top two spots in a rotation depending on how far his control improves.

Lombard was ranked No. 46 by Baseball America and No. 32 by MLB Pipeline. He still has some refining to do, as he struggled during his brief taste of Double-A. The former first-round pick hit .215 with 124 strikeouts in 108 games.

Lagrange, a big-bodied starter at 6-foot-7, pitched to a 3.22 ERA for Double-A Somerset in 2025, appearing in 15 games. There’s a chance he begins 2026 at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, and he could potentially make an impact in the majors this season. 

There is latent hope in just about every baseball prospect. Prospect, by definition, implies a good bit of promise and a lot of expectation with variability.

With Arnaldo Lantigua, though, there’s an added bit of prospect pressure. Acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers, he was dealt to the Cincinnati Reds for an amount of international bonus pool cash that was directly used by the Trolleys to sign Roki Sasaki out of Japan, meaning the Reds – with Lantigua now in-tow – directly financed their rivals adding a potential star.

Lantigua, to his credit, has hit the ground running since joining the Reds organization despite the otherwise outsized expectations. In Arizona Complex League play in 2025 he swatted 10 homers in just 49 games – a mark that tied him with Dario Reynoso from the Giants organization for most in the league – and he slugged .445 with a .763 OPS in 129 PA after being promoted to Class-A Daytona in the pitcher-friendly Florida State League.

For reference, the likes of Tyson Lewis (.417 SLG) and Sammy Stafura (.410) were his teammates in Daytona, and Arnaldo just turned 20 years old in December.

There’s a whole lot of power in Lantigua’s bat, and there’s a whole lot to like about his power potential. That makes for quite the intriguing prospect, one you collectively ranked 10th in this year’s Community Prospect Rankings over the weekend!

The Dodgers’ $240-million signing of Kyle Tucker revived anguished cries that the team is ruining baseball. It also revived a strange chapter in team history, with frenzied online commentary that the signing of Tucker was made possible in large part because Major League Baseball long ago rewarded the Dodgers’ owners with preferential financial treatment that continues to this day.

Is that true?

Yes and no.

Uh, thanks. Go on.

Remember Frank McCourt, the Dodgers’ former owner?

Read more:Shaikin: Kyle Tucker is really going to trigger a lockout? Come on now

In 2011, after then-Commissioner Bud Selig rejected a proposed $3-billion local television deal between the Dodgers and Fox Sports, McCourt took the team into bankruptcy court before agreeing to sell. That meant Selig and the MLB owners would not pick the new Dodgers owner. McCourt would, in a process controlled by the court.

With the Dodgers’ local TV rights soon to expire, McCourt realized bidders for the team might offer more — and he might make more — if the bidders knew in advance how much the league would take from the sale of those rights.

In a settlement with McCourt — and to avoid the risk of the judge imposing a deal less favorable to the league — MLB agreed the fair-market value of a Dodgers TV deal would be based on the very Fox deal that Selig had rejected.

Why did that matter?

That value was $84 million for the first year and would increase thereafter, with the league taking its standard 34% cut and sharing that among all its teams.

However, with a bidding war looming between Fox Sports and Time Warner Cable, Selig knew the rights would be worth more than Fox had offered in its extension with McCourt, who needed immediate cash.

In bankruptcy court, an attorney for Guggenheim, the winning bidder and still the Dodgers’ owner, said the settlement represented a “substantial component of the value proposition of the transaction” — that is, a primary justification for the then-record $2.15-billion purchase price.

In 2013, one year after buying the team, Guggenheim sold those local TV rights. Were they indeed worth more?

You might as well ask if Shohei Ohtani is good. The rights that McCourt wanted to sell for $3 billion were bought by Time Warner Cable for a record $8.35 billion.

Because of the settlement, the league would take its cut based on a deal worth $3 billion rather than based on a deal worth $8.35 billion.

And the league was fine with this, because it wanted to help a marquee franchise return to glory?

LOL, no. In 2012, an MLB attorney had warned the court that the settlement could result in a league of “the Dodgers and the other 29 teams.” Under its terms, the Dodgers could keep tens of millions of dollars each year that otherwise would be shared with the league.

In the wake of the massive Time Warner deal, Selig’s office told other owners it planned to treat television revenue for the Dodgers like television revenue from any other team.

Read more:One last roundup for Clayton Kershaw: He'll pitch in World Baseball Classic

However, thanks to McCourt, the bankruptcy court was in charge, not the league. MLB did not have the power to redo the court-approved settlement, because Guggenheim could have asked the court to uphold the deal and order the league to abide by it.

After negotiations, MLB and Guggenheim made a modest adjustment, setting the “fair-market value” of the Time Warner deal at about $130 million for the first year rather than $84 million. That figure is used to determine the league’s cut, which for all local TV deals has since increased from 34% to 48%.

Just about every report on the Dodgers’ TV deal says the team is guaranteed $334 million each year. Is that accurate?

That $334 million is the annual average. The deal started at a lower value and increases every year.

By the time the deal ends in 2038, the Dodgers will be getting more than $500 million per year.

How is that possible? Aren’t local sports channels dying?

The parent company of the FanDuel Sports channels — including the one that carries the Angels — emerged from bankruptcy last year but now is fighting to remain in business. If your company spends millions upon millions on sports rights, and if your financial success depends on cable and satellite customers paying for a programming bundle that includes sports channels most viewers do not watch, you’re doomed.

The Angels’ local television revenue took a big hit last year and probably will do so again this year. The Milwaukee Brewers, the team that plays in the smallest market in the majors, reportedly got $35 million in its FanDuel deal last year.

The Dodgers own SportsNet LA through a related entity, American Media Productions (AMP), and the television revenue comes via a marketing and distribution agreement with Charter Communications, which inherited the deal when it acquired Time Warner Cable in 2016.

Charter’s revenue in 2024: $55 billion. The giant television, telephone and broadband company is not going out of business anytime soon, even as it is stuck with a money-losing Dodgers deal.

What did Dodgers chairman Mark Walter say upon the establishment of SportsNet LA?

“The creation of AMP will provide substantial financial resources over the coming years for the Dodgers to build on their storied legacy and bring a world championship home to Los Angeles.”

Read more:Shaikin: Make starting pitchers great again? MLB isn't. This independent league will try

Nailed it. So why would Walter consider forsaking some of those substantial financial resources?

In 2028, when MLB national TV contracts expire, Commissioner Rob Manfred would like to offer traditional networks and streaming services the chance to bid not just on national broadcasts but on an all-baseball, all-the-time outlet where fans could watch any team, wherever they lived, and with no blackouts. With that, the league believes, it could strike gold — and then share the wealth among all 30 teams.

That would require teams to turn over their local broadcast rights to the league. The Dodgers’ local television revenues provide a massive competitive advantage. It’s hard to imagine Walter (and owners of other big-city teams with similar TV riches) surrendering those riches without the league offering him something significant in return.

Like what?

Perhaps a chance to exempt the Dodgers from sharing ticket revenue, or to secure the Japanese television rights now controlled by MLB. Maybe the league would buy SportsNet LA. Could be anything. But that is a 2028 issue. First up is collective bargaining, and the possibility of owners shutting down the sport next winter in pursuit of a salary cap.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Ben Williamson doesn’t rush; he just moves quickly. The defensive standout’s quick feet and steady hands earned him a promotion to MLB after just 689 plate appearances in the minors, despite his college career coming in the decidedly mid CAA. And he spent most of the first two-thirds of the 2025 season as the Mariners’ starting third baseman, despite questions about his bat.

Yet by August 1, he was back in Triple-A. While he’d been showing improvements with the bat over the course of his rookie campaign, an Eugenio Suárez reunion was too tempting for the Mariners to upgrade Williamson’s .253/.294/.310 line.

But that batting line only tells part of the story. Williamson’s 2025 reveals a fascinating development puzzle: he improved his plate discipline and contact rates as the season progressed, yet his power indicators collapsed. And while it’s as if a light bulb clicked on when he got back to Tacoma—turning in a 135 wRC+ over the last two months in AAA—key questions lingered.

The May Baseline

We checked in on B Willy after his first month in the show, when his 63 wRC+ looked concerning but there were promising signs under the hood.

The clearest room for growth was in his approach. He chased at unacceptable rates, swinging at 22.3% of pitches in the chase zone and 42.6% of pitches that were in the shadow zone but not the strike zone. And he was simultaneously too passive on hitter’s pitches, swinging at just 64.8% of pitches in the heart of the plate, compared to the league average of 72.4%. He was going fishing while avoiding meatballs like it was a Friday during Lent. While he made enough contact to avoid a Kelenic-esque strikeout rate, his walk rate jumped off the page in a bad way: 3.1%.

But under the hood, his power indicators offered hope. His dynamic hard hit rate (DHH%) was above league average, suggesting big raw power even if it wasn’t always showing up in good contact. DHH% is the best indicator for young hitters because it shows power potential by measuring how hard a player hits the ball relative to launch angle: Despite being a worse result, an 80-mph pop up requires much more strength than an 80-mph line drive, so DHH% gives a player more credit for the pop-up. In addition, despite not swinging at the right pitches, he still managed a hard-hit rate and a barrel rate around league average. It suggested that if he could improve his swing decisions, the offense would pop.

As the season progressed, so did Williamson, but not always in the ways the early data suggested.

Improving at a Cost

From there, Williamson’s plate discipline improved—mostly. He showed real improvement in the shadow zone, learning to lay off borderline pitches, and his walk rate doubled while he cut down his strikeouts by a quarter. But he didn’t improve much on pitches even farther outside the zone, in the chase region.

How could both be true? The League figured out how to attack him. He’d go fishing on changeups and sweepers about 25% more often than average. So pitchers peppered those pitches and knew they had a fat margin for error outside the zone.

This isn’t just a question of spin on the sweepers—he also struggled with sliders, but it wasn’t as pronounced. And his swing decisions and contact rates were actually better than the league against curveballs. Nor was it purely a question of timing—again, he was better against curveballs. Rather, what this suggests is a problem with horizontal movement. That’s what the changeup and sweeper have in common.

Making matters worse, the hope that he’d tap into his power crumbled along with his launch angle. He started his MLB tour with an elevated groundball rate, at 47.8% through May 15, relative to the league’s 41.8%. But from there, it’s like he was deliberately taunting the Shai-Hulud, spiking his groundball rate to 61.8%, second-highest in MLB over that stretch.

The good news is that a lot of those groundballs got through, as he kept his hard-hit rate around average. The bad news is his DHH% was a small-sample mirage, as it went from above league average before May 15 to about half of league average afterwards. There’s not as much power potential as we’d hoped, and he’s not a swing-path change away from becoming a 30-doubles hitter.

So his overall results got better, raising his wRC+ from 62 to 83, but the adjustments he made in his swing decisions weren’t enough to outrun the league figuring him out or the collapse in his launch angle. He became a better hitter in some ways while losing what made him projectable.

The Tacoma Breakthrough?

Ben Williamson’s best  trait has long been his coachability. If you don’t believe me, ask his college coaches, as Kate did last summer. So it came as an encouraging sign that he seemed to learn some lessons from his first tour of MLB.

After he returned to Tacoma, his offense exploded, even by the standards of the PCL, where every night is 90s Night.

But the power was illusive. Even in Triple-A, his barrel rate was just half the PCL average, and his launch angle was just 1%. He wasn’t solving the fundamental bat path issue, just thriving despite it. His success came more from contact and discipline than from barrelling up the ball.

Unfortunately, his time in Tacoma tells us little about whether he solved his vulnerability to changeups and sweepers. He saw just 33 changeups and 43 sweepers after his demotion. The good news is he looked a lot better against the ones he saw. He cut his chase rate on changeups in half and then some, going from 45.1% in MLB to just 21.1% after his demotion; and he only whiffed twice on the 14 total swings on changeups. And against the sweepers, his chase rate fell from 39.1% to 23.1%; and he only whiffed three times out of his 19 total swings. The results were better, but the reality is that 33 AAA changeups and 43 AAA sweepers aren’t enough to know if he actually solved anything.

The Floor

Even if Williamson will never be Kyle Seager or Eugenio Suárez with the bat, his glove continues to give him a floor you could live with. He led AL third basemen in DRS at the time of his demotion, and ultimately finished sixth in MLB despite playing in just 85 games. While that didn’t show up in OAA, the eye test suggests DRS is truer to reality.

So even if his Tacoma results are his true AAA talent, and his MLB results are his true MLB talent—and it’s too early to know if either is true—you still can’t slap a Quad-A label on him.

Consider what it looks like if an 85 wRC+ bat with elite defense at third base is all he is? That’s the version of Williamson that we saw between May 15 and July 31, and it put him on pace for 1.2 fWAR over 150 games, but that’s using OAA for the defensive component, which I don’t trust for Williamson’s 2025. Looking instead at Ke’Bryan Hayes’s 2022 and Maikel Garcia’s 2023, I see pretty similar profiles (with slightly better baserunning) netting out to a 2-3 win player. Baseball Reference, which uses DRS for its defensive component, suggests a 1-4 win player.

That’s not a cornerstone of a championship favorite, but it’s good enough for an everyday player on a contender if he’s one of your weak points.

Seattle might be able to do better than that at third base in 2026. Suárez is still available for money, and Colt Emerson is knocking on the door. But having Williamson as a floor option leaves the Mariners in fine shape, even if his improvements in AAA don’t translate back to the bigs. And if they do, Williamson’s a star.

One of the things the Cubs lacked in their 92-win team in 2025 was a good, traditional backup outfielder.

They had Vidal Bruján backing up Pete Crow-Armstrong in center field, and that, as you know, was hardly optimal. Willi Castro and Jon Berti also played outfield for the Cubs last year. Apart from Ian Happ, PCA, Kyle Tucker and Seiya Suzuki, the only true outfielder who played for the 2025 Cubs was Owen Caissie.

The Cubs are attempting to address this by adding some outfield depth. Last week they signed Chas McCormick, formerly of the Astros, to a minor-league deal with a NRI to Spring Training (Bluesky link):

McCormick had a really good year for Houston in 2023, batting .273/.353/.489 with 22 home runs in 115 games, good for 3.4 bWAR. Injuries ruined McCormick’s last two years; he played in just 64 games in 2025 and didn’t crack a .600 OPS either of the last two seasons.

I don’t think the Cubs are looking for miracles here, though McCormick has been a useful outfielder at times in his career. He turns 31 in April. Most likely, he gets stashed at Triple-A Iowa as outfield insurance. He does have 33 games of postseason experience.

Oh, and his actual given name is… Chas. It’s not short for “Charles.”

There’s been no official announcement by the team regarding another signing, but there’s a clue from this social media post:

So, if Dylan Carlson is working out with Cubs players at the Sloan Park complex, I’d think that’s a pretty good sign that he’s also, as noted, been signed to a minor-league deal with a Spring Training NRI.

Just five years ago, Carlson was a Top 20 prospect in all of baseball. Indeed, he had a really good year with the Cardinals in 2021, batting .266/.343/.437 with 31 doubles and 18 home runs. That got him a third-place finish in Rookie of the Year voting.

His numbers declined in 2022 and by 2023 he was a backup outfielder with the Cardinals. As was the case with McCormick, injuries appear to have been a lot of the issue here, including a hamstring strain, oblique strain, shoulder strain. Lastly, there was an ankle sprain that eventually required surgery.

In 2025, Carlson rode the Orioles’ Triple-A shuttle, recalled and optioned the maximum allowed five times, and batted just .203/.278/.336 in 83 games with Baltimore. He did hit well in 28 games at Triple-A Norfolk, .294/.421/.451.

Fun fact: At the trade deadline in 2024, Carlson was traded to the Rays from the Cardinals for Shawn Armstrong. Exactly a month later the Cardinals waived Armstrong and the Cubs claimed him. Armstrong posted a 4.91 ERA and 1.909 WHIP in eight games for the Cubs in September 2024. He’s played for eight teams, which makes him a great Immaculate Grid answer.

Carlson is only 27. If he’s healthy, perhaps he can recover some of that ability that made him a top prospect. At this point, on a NRI he’s certainly worth it. If he can’t play, he just gets released. If he can? Maybe he makes the team and Kevin Alcántara goes back to Iowa. Carlson’s a switch-hitter, so there’s that.

Just thought this would be a useful topic of discussion on a January day when there’s not much news.

After six months of intermittent rumors, the Mets finally completed a trade for Luis Robert. The 28-year-old center fielder heads to Queens in exchange for Luisangel Acuña and Truman Pauley, the Mets’ 12th-round pick in last year’s draft. Robert is under contract for $20M in 2026 with an additional club option for $20M in 2027.

If you’re a Robert skeptic, I hear you. He batted only .223/.297/.364 for the White Sox last year, posting a pitiful 84 wRC+ equivalent to his 2024 mark. A history of hamstring, hip flexor, and other injuries (groin, calf, and wrist among them) has prevented Robert from ever topping 145 games in a season; he’s only topped 100 games twice in his six-year career. We’re now three years removed from Robert’s last above average offensive season, his career-best 2023 in which he hit 38 HR, posted a 129 wRC+, and accrued 4.9 fWAR.

Let’s lay out the positives, though. Even as his offense has fallen off the last two seasons, Robert has remained a high-quality defender in center field (1 OAA in 2024, 7 OAA in 2025). The physical skills—chiefly his bat speed and sprint speed—are both pretty clearly intact given the better-than 90th percentile marks he posted last season. Even his strikeout rate, which increased in 2023 and peaked over 30% in 2024, improved markedly in 2025, driven by both a higher contact rate and better swing decisions. In fact, Robert ran a 95th percentile SEAGER last season, the highest mark of his career.

That paints the picture of a player with a pretty solid floor, a high-quality center fielder with speed and power. There’s real upside here beyond that, though, as Robert was one of the unluckiest hitters in baseball last season by xwOBA. It’s not because his spray angles suck either, as he manages above average pulled fly ball rates. If you’re a fan of arbitrary endpoint analysis, we might’ve already gotten a glimpse at a more accurate representation of Robert’s output from June to August last season; .262/.326/.431, with a 109 wRC+.

We’ve not addressed the injuries of course, and indeed the date window above ends in August because Robert pulled his hamstring and missed the rest of the season. The Mets are particularly well positioned to accommodate this sort of injury prone upside play because of Carson Benge.

Benge is the #2 prospect in the system and is going to be a consensus top-20 or higher name by the end of the offseason (BA had him 19th, BP will have him higher). The Mets are pretty clearly giving Benge runway to win a job out of spring training and run with it, something they’re incentivized to do under the PPI system. With Robert around, Benge now projects as the starting left fielder, but he’s completely capable of sliding over to center if/when Robert misses time. If things really go south for whatever reason, Benge can stay in center with Brett Baty in left. Or maybe A.J. Ewing is ready. Or maybe the Mets make a trade for a corner bat (something that is usually pretty cheap at the deadline). The point is that the Mets have the optimal roster construction to roll the dice on a high-upside, injury prone center field option like Robert

In a vacuum, the return here is not strictly nothing. Luisangel Acuña has enough defensive utility to be an interesting bench bat and could maybe get the offense to passable given enough runway to figure it out. Truman Pauley is a fun prospect, a Harvard sophomore who never posted impressive stats but popped on stuff models. Both of those profiles have some level of value.

For the Mets, though, the cost is fairly inconsequential. Acuña’s bat is a weakness (no, you shouldn’t care about his Winter League home run barrage) and his ability to play shortstop doesn’t matter with the Mets’ current roster. Critically, he’s also out of options, meaning the Mets would have had to either carry a sub-optimal player on the bench and give him no development runway or lose him through waivers. Trading him is a far better outcome, both for the Mets and Acuña, who should get an extended run to see if things click in Chicago.

As for Pauley, you’d love to keep all of these guys, but the Mets drafted literally four other arms that fit this broad description with higher picks in the same draft, and have shown a penchant for improving most any arm they bring into the system. Moving this kind of player is an option afforded to you by having the best pitching development apparatus in baseball.

So in total, the Mets got a high-upside center field option with a clear floor independent of his top-line offensive output. They have the right roster construction to appropriately hedge the associated injury risk. If things work out, they can keep Robert for another season at only $20M; if not, they can decline the option and move on. And to add this player, they paid a cost that is inconsequential to the organization. Every part of this is a slam dunk win, making this move a clear A+.